"The impressions left on my father by this early phantom of delight
were indelible and colored the whole of his afterlife. He
believed that far beyond all other influences they shaped his
character, and they never ceased to haunt his memory. Allusions to
it are constantly recurring in all his published works, and in none
of them more than in the last of all. He was much affected by them,
and not knowing to what they referred, we wondered that the
creations of his fancy should exercise such power over him. They
were not creations of fancy, but the memories of fifty years past."
After the abrupt end of his first romance he conceived a sort of
friendship for Lady Caroline Lamb, which came very near the verge of
love. Lady Caroline was between thirty and forty years old at this time,
it being subsequent to her intrigue with Lord Byron. She looked much
younger than her age,--thanks, perhaps, to a slight rounded figure and a
child-like mode of wearing her pale golden hair in loose curls. She had
large hazel eyes, good teeth, and a pleasant laugh. She had to a
surpassing degree the qualities that charm, and never failed to please.
Her conversation was remarkable, and she was the only woman, Byron said,
who never bored him. She was a creature of caprice, and impulse, and
whim, and had been known to send a page around to all her guests at
Brocket at three o'clock in the morning to say that she was playing the
great organ on the staircase, and requested the pleasure of their
company. And it is added that the invitation was never refused, and that
daylight would find them listening, spellbound and without a thought of
bed. Here is Bulwer's own account of the close of this little episode
with Lady Caroline. He was staying at her house, and had become very
jealous of a Mr. Russell.
"I went downstairs. Russell sat opposite me. He wore a ring. It was
one which Lord Byron had given Lady Caroline: one which was to be
worn only by those she loved. I had often worn it myself. She had
wanted me to accept it, but I would not, because it was so costly.
And now _he_ wore it. Can you conceive my resentment, my
wretchedness? After dinner I threw myself upon a sofa. Music was
playing. Lady Caroline came to me. 'Are you mad?' said she. I
looked up. The tears stood in my eyes. I could not have spoken a
word for the world. What do you think she said aloud? 'Don't play
this melancholy air,--it affects Mr. Bulwer so that he is actually
weeping.' My tears, my softness, my love were over in a moment.
When we broke up in the evening I said to her, 'Farewell forever.
It is over. Now I see you in your true light. Instead of jealousy I
only feel contempt. Farewell. Go and be happy.'"
This account reads very much like a page from "Pelham" or "Devereux,"
and the whole account of his affairs of the heart is written in a
similar manner.
All this had passed before he was twenty-two. At that age he first met
Rosina Wheeler, at an evening party. He was talking busily to his mother
when she suddenly exclaimed: "O Edward, what a singularly beautiful
face! Do look. Who can she be?"
An elderly gentleman was leading through the room in which they sat a
young lady of remarkable beauty, who, from the simplicity of her
costume, seemed to be unmarried. He turned his head languidly, as he
says, with a strangely troubled sensation, and beheld his fate before
him,--in other words, his future wife.
Rosina Wheeler was at this time twenty-three, and in the full blossom of
a very remarkable beauty. Her father was an Irish squire, who at the age
of seventeen had married a very beautiful girl two years younger than
himself. The natural result of this marriage was a separation, after the
birth of two children, one of them the future Lady Lytton. Domestic
infelicity seems to have been the heritage of every one connected with
the Bulwer family even in the remotest manner.
And now it appears again in the family of the woman to whom the latest
scion of the old house is to be united. Bulwer's mother opposed the
match strenuously from the first. Her pride, her prudence, her
forebodings, and her motherly susceptibilities all rose up against it.
And she never gave her consent to it, or became really reconciled to it
after it had taken place. Although very unwilling to displease his
mother in so vital a matter, Bulwer seems to have gone steadily on to
such a consummation; not borne away certainly by strong passion, but
rather influenced, it would seem, by a tender regard for the feelings of
Miss Wheeler, who had grown much attached to him. Not without many a
struggle with himself, however, did he yield. He was tenderly attached
to his mother, and it was a great grief to him to do so important a
thing without her approval; and, moreover, his income and all his
worldly prospects depended upon her. He does not seem to have been
particularly happy over his own prospects, for in one of the last
letters he wrote before marriage he says:--
"My intended is very beautiful, very clever, very good; but, alas!
the human heart is inscrutable. I love and am loved. My heart is
satisfied, my judgment, too. And still I am wretched."
There have been published within a few years a great number of the
love-letters written by Bulwer to Miss Wheeler about this time. His son
publishes none of them in the late biography, and it is safe to say that
in all the range of literature there are no other letters filled with
such drivelling idiocy as these. Had they been written by some Cockney
coachman to some sentimental housemaid, they should stand as the finest
specimens of that grade of literature extant; but that they should have
been written by one of the foremost literary men of his time is a
marvel, and seems to show to what extremes of imbecility love may reduce
even wise men. As for Lady Lytton herself, one cares to know little more
than that she could have married a man who habitually addressed her as
his "sugar-plum," his "tootsy-wootsy," and his "sweety-weety." A woman
clothed and in her right mind, who could deliberately accept such a
personage for a life-long companion, calls for small sympathy from a
matter-of-fact world, unless, indeed, it be that we bestow our sympathy
simply upon the grounds of her feeble-mindedness.
In less than three years began the vulgar quarrels which finally ended
the marriage. Bulwer is described by a visitor to the house about this
time as appearing "like a man who has been flayed and is sore all over."
His temperament was by nature extremely sensitive and irritable. And the
combined Bulwer and Lytton blood was hot, turbulent, and at times quite
uncontrollable. There are records of scenes of absolute personal
violence against his wife, and one instance is given where at dinner,
during the momentary absence of the servant, he bit her cheek till the
blood flowed freely. After marriage, his income being cut off by his
mother, he for a time wrote for his bread; and the work, close and
confining as it was, told very much upon his health.
"His feelings became morbidly acute, and all the petty household
worries were to his exasperated brain what frictions and jostlings
are to highly inflamed flesh. His wife had little of his society.
He was nearly always writing or making preparation for writing, and
when they were together his nervous irritability vented itself at
every unwelcome circumstance in complaints, or taunts, or fits of
anger. To harsh words and unjust reproaches his wife returned meek
replies. Any distress his conduct occasioned her she concealed from
him. She was studious to please him, and endeavored to anticipate
every want and wish. Her gentleness and forbearance increased his
gratitude and devotion to her, and whenever he perceived that she
was wounded he was full of remorse."